The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A database may provide a file repository that can be accessed via a variety of file system-based interfaces, such as those utilizing HTTP/WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) or NFS (Network File System). Through such interfaces to the repository, a file is located, for example, via its URL or path, and the repository is exposed as a hierarchical set of files and folders (e.g., directories). Further, data-oriented access mechanisms can be used to access a file repository, which expose the repository as a flat set of files that can be queried based on file content or attributes.
Some interfaces, such as repository views, are a combination of data-oriented and navigational access mechanisms. Operators like under_path, which determines whether a path exists to a given file under a specified subtree in the folder hierarchy, may be executed in a data-oriented or navigational way depending on various factors, such as query costs. A similar operator is equals_path, which determines whether a given file is located at the specified path.